


Almost.

by StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese



Category: Back to the Future (Movies)
Genre: Introspection, Time Travel, the consequences of time travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:07:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26162386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese/pseuds/StopIWantToTalkAboutCheese
Summary: Marty McFly returns, victorious, to 1985. He has changed the past, and he has put himself and his family on a better path.He just never thought about what that meant.
Relationships: Marty McFly/Jennifer Parker
Comments: 15
Kudos: 54





	Almost.

**Author's Note:**

> I know, there are a ton of these fics. Here's my take?

When Marty returned from 1885, he had been good and ready to never, ever, time travel again. Sure, the Doc was having fun, but it just wasn’t for Marty. He wasn’t an action hero. He was just some loser kid, a slacker.

Except apparently he wasn’t.

The first time he’d gone back to school, after the weekend on the lake, Strickland had come up to him and complimented his “go-get-’em attitude” and “strong-willed” personality. Hadn’t Strickland been calling him a slacker and bullheaded just last week?

There were other differences, big and small. Oak Street had been renamed Eastwood Street. His mother wasn’t an alcoholic. His father was successful. Biff was still scum, but he was under Marty’s father’s heel now. His room was still a disaster, and his mother still nagged him to clean it up, but Marty noticed that he now owned a couple pairs of designer sneakers, and his guitar looked shiner and sturdier. One random thing that completely shocked Marty was that he no longer worked at the local record shop on the weekends. He didn’t need the money anymore; his parents could provide him with an allowance.

Another weird thing was how _nice_ everyone was to him. Sure, Dave and Linda still teased him, like siblings do, and his mother and father gently ribbed him about Jennifer and childhood mishaps, but just like Strickland, everyone else seemed to just be… nicer to Marty. His classmates asked him for advice on music. His teachers offered him short tutoring sessions in the five minutes between classes if he was confused. The employees at the mall gave him free samples of various foods. He didn’t understand why or what was going on until strangers started stopping him in the street to enthusiastically ask “Are you George McFly’s kid?” 

“All this because of a few trips in a DeLorean?” he’d marveled to Jennifer, and she had laughed.

He had enjoyed it at first. Who wouldn’t? It was like a vacation, in a more successful version of his life.

But as the weeks wore on and Marty didn’t wake up in his old house, with his old family, the feeling of euphoria began to wane as the disconnection began to set in.

The tipping point ended up not being the street names, or the weird kindnesses because of who his father was, or losing a job he never had in the first place.

It’s the kitchen cabinets.

Marty woke up in the middle of the night, couldn’t sleep, and decided to get a bowl of cereal. As you do.

He got up, stumbled through the dark hallway, tripped over a chair in the living room because _oh yeah_ , they had a chair there now instead of empty carpet, and finally staggered into the kitchen, nursing a couple of bruised shins.

So Marty hit the lightswitch with the side of his fist, too-bright artificial light flooded the room, and he set about making himself a bowl of Wheaties.

Only they didn’t have Wheaties. Or Rice Krispy. Or even Cheerios.

Marty rifled through the cabinets. Where was his cereal? It was _cereal_. It didn’t need special rearrangement based on how his mother and father got together thirty years ago!

Apparently, Marty had been making a lot more noise than he intended, because his mother came in after a couple minutes of Marty’s frustrated banging around the kitchen.

“Marty?”

Marty whipped around. “Mom!”

His mother’s brows were furrowed, staring quizzically at him. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, uh,” Marty said, feeling stupid. “I was just looking for the cereal, Mom. Where–” he winced, “uh, where do we keep it, again?”

She looked at him like he had lost his mind, but started towards the cabinets. “It’s in here,” she said, opening a little door that Marty hadn’t even seen and pulling out a clear plastic container. Sure enough, it was filled with Cinnamon Life cereal.

“Oh,” he said.

He poured his cereal.

“Good night,” his mother said, still looking at him oddly. “Love you.”

“Love you,” he muttered, staring into the bowl.

He toyed with his food and thought about a worn-out cabinet that had everything from Cheez-Its to Cheerios in it, and how he could stagger into the kitchen blindly and take it out without even thinking.

His family was asleep in the dark house, the house that he had supposedly grown up in and played in and worked in and _been happy_ in, but Marty had never felt like more of an alien.

* * *

In class one day, they talked about the hero’s journey.

“You see,” the poor, overenthusiastic sap at the front of the room said, “at the end of the hero’s journey, they return to their world again- the known world. They have changed, but the world has not. You can see this in J.R.R. Tolkein’s famous work _The Hobbit_ …”

Marty tuned him out.

If the hero was supposed to come back at the end of the journey, where did that leave him? For that matter, Marty didn’t feel changed at all. In fact, his circumstances were the exact opposite of what the teacher had said– it wasn’t him that had been changed by the journey, but the world around him. 

Did that mean Marty could never truly return? Was Marty perpetually locked out of closure, doomed to spend the rest of his life in the “unknown world”? Had his odyssey been suspended just before the circle was complete, leaving him trapped in limbo, unable to finish what he had started?

When the bell rang, Marty was the first one out the door.

* * *

Marty had started to hate the word _almost_. His brother and sister were _almost_ the same people he remembered. His house was _almost_ exactly as he remembered it. Biff was _almost_ the same dirt wipe he’d always been.

Marty just wanted to go home. It sucked, but it was _home_. There would be no _almosts_ , only cold, clear certainties.

God, he hated the stupid kitchen cupboards.

He tried asking the Doc about it, when he visited. But Doc would always get uncomfortable with that line of questioning.

“Time travel gave me a family, Marty,” he said.

“And it took mine away,” Marty argued right back. 

Doc, for once, had no reply.

It was true, as much as Marty hated to voice the thought aloud. These were not the people he had grown up with. This was a Bizzaro version of them. Marty had fallen into the Twilight Zone and Rod Sterling was holding him captive. Sometimes, he woke up in the middle of the night and he hated the peppy, thin version of his mother and the goofy, successful version of his father with his entire being.

But as the visits from the Doc got fewer and farther in between, Marty knew. 

He was well and truly stuck here.

Like it or not, Marty was done with time travel.

* * *

So Marty kissed his mother and hugged his father and annoyed his older brother and sister, and shot Biff the evil eye when nobody was looking. He thought that he could get used to this. He could survive living in a world that was so different and yet so similar to his own.

But then he woke up in a cold sweat, reaching out blindly for an alarm clock that was positioned on the other side of the bed. He got As and Bs on papers that he _knew_ were C or D-worthy just a week ago. People sucked up to him because he was George McFly’s son, and that was all that mattered about him. Never mind his music. Never mind his own talents.

But what did he have to complain about? He was alive. Doc was alive. His family was happy. Heck, even Marty was happy, most days.

* * *

Besides, he really couldn’t protest. Almost everything was exactly the same.

Almost.

**Author's Note:**

> Tell me what you thought?


End file.
